Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Working at the intersections of black feminism, queer theory, and poetics, her critical project, tentatively titled “The Poetics of Difference in Afrodiasporic Women’s Literature,” examines the potentials of narrative, poetic, and dramatic voice to contest dominant models of identity in women’s writing of the African diaspora. She is an editorial collective member of The Feminist Wire and sits on the executive council of the Modern Language Association. Her critical and creative writing has appeared in Callaloo, GLQ, Best New Writing, American Fiction, Crab Orchard Review, Ms. Magazine Online, The Root, and others. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in English at Rutgers University, and in 2014 will begin as an assistant professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass, Amherst. Her short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, is forthcoming.

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics.